The Next Ukraine

While the world’s attention is focused on the Middle East, as usual, where
ISIS – the creation of Washington’s Saudi and Gulf allies – is the focus of
the latest alleged “terrorist threat,” a potentially more dangerous crisis is
being ramped up by our professional regime-changers in the volatile Balkans.

The Russian-Turkish
plan to pipe Russian gas through Turkey and then on to Macedonia and thence
into southern Europe has long been opposed by the West, which is seeking to
block the Russians at every turn. Now the Western powers have found an effective
way to stop it: by overthrowing the pro-Russian government of Macedonian Prime
Minister Nikola Gruevski.

The original plan was for the pipeline to go through Bulgaria, but Western
pressure on the government there nixed that and so the alternative was to pipe
the gas through Macedonia and Greece. With the Greeks uninterested in taking
dictation from the EU – and relatively impervious, at the moment, to Western-sponsored
regime change – the Macedonians were deemed to be the weak link in the pro-Russian
chain. That was the cue for the perpetually aggrieved Albanians to play their
historic role as the West’s willing proxies.

After a long period of dormancy, suddenly the “National Liberation Army” (NLA)
of separatist Albanians rose up, commandeering police stations in Kumanovo and
a nearby village earlier this month. A 16-hour gun battle ensued, with 8 Macedonian
police and 14 terrorists killed in the fighting. The NLA, which reportedly
received vital
assistance from Western powers during the 2001 insurgency, claimed responsibility
for the attacks.

Simultaneously, the opposition Social Democratic Union party (SDSM) – formerly
the ruling League of Communists under the Stalinist Tito regime – called for
mass demonstrations over a series of recent government scandals. SDSM
has lost the last three elections, deemed “fair” by the OCSE, with Gruevski’s
conservative VMRO-DPMNE (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic
Party for Macedonian National Unity) enjoying a comfortable majority in parliament.
But that doesn’t matter to the “pro-democracy” regime-changers: SDSM
leader Zoran Zaev declared “This will not be a protest where
we gather, express discontent and go home. We will stay until Gruevski quits.”

Macedonia has a long history of manipulation
at the hands of the NATO powers, who nurtured the Muslim-Kosovar insurgency
to impose their will on the components of the former Yugoslavia. As in Kosovo,
the Albanians of Macedonia were willing pawns of the West, carrying out terrorist
attacks on civilians in pursuit of their goal of a “Greater Albania.”

During the 2001 Albanian insurgency, an outgrowth
of the Kosovo war, the EU/US used the NLA as a battering ram against the Slavic
authorities. The NLA was never an authentic indigenous force, but actually an
arm of the US-armed-and-trained “Kosovo Liberation Army,” which now rules over
the gangster state of Kosovo, crime capital of Europe. A “peace accord,” the
Ohrid Agreement,was brokered by the West, which kept the NLA essentially intact,
albeit formally “dissolved,” while the Macedonian government was blackmailed
into submission. I wrote about it at the time, here
and here.

Follow that last link to read about the George Soros connection. Soros was
originally a big booster of Macedonia, handing them a $25 million aid package and holding the country up as a model of multiculturalism. However, the Macedonians
soon turned against him when he sided with the Albanians in their demands for
government-subsidized Albanian-language universities and ethnic quotas for government
jobs. When he told them to change the name of the country to “Slavomakejonija,”
they told him to take a walk. Soros, a longtime promoter of Albanian separatism
– he played sugar daddy to a multitude of front groups that promoted the Kosovo
war – is now getting his revenge.

Prime Minister Gruevski, for his part, charges that the sudden uptick in ethnic
violence and political turmoil is the work of Western “NGOs” and intelligence
agencies (or do I repeat myself?) with the latter playing a key role in releasing
recordings of phone conversations incriminating several top government officials.
A not-so-implausible scenario, given what happened in neighboring Ukraine.

Speaking of which: the government of President Petro Poroshenko is leading
the country into complete financial insolvency and veritable martial law. Aid
money from the West is going into the prosecution of the ongoing civil war,
and the country has already defaulted
on its huge debt in all but the formal sense. Opposition politicians and
journalists are routinely murdered and their deaths reported as “suicides,”
while it is now illegal to describe the ongoing conflict with the eastern provinces
as anything but a “Russian invasion.” Journalists who contradict the official
view are imprisoned: Ruslan Kotsaba, whose arrest I reported on in this space,
is still being held, his
“trial” a farce that no Western journalist has seen fit to report on. Kotsaba’s
“crime”? Making a video in which he denounced the war and called on his fellow
Ukrainians to resist being conscripted into the military. Antiwar activists
throughout the country have been rounded up and imprisoned. Any journalist connected
to a Russian media outlet has been arrested.

Yes, these are the “European values” Ukraine is now putting into practice.
Adding ignominy to outrage, a law was recently passed – in spite of this
Reuters piece urging Poroshenko to veto it – which makes it a crime to criticize
the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
(UPA) that fought on the side of the Germans during World War II. As Ha’aretzreports, a group of 40 historians
from major Western academic institutions issued an open letter protesting this
outrage:

"Not only would it be a
crime to question the legitimacy of an organization (UPA) that slaughtered tens
of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in
the history of Ukraine, but also it would exempt from criticism the OUN, one
of the most extreme political groups in Western Ukraine between the wars, and
one which collaborated with Nazi Germany at the outset of the Soviet invasion
in 1941. It also took part in anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine and, in the case
of the Melnyk faction, remained allied with the occupation regime throughout
the war."

Ukraine is showing its true colors, which I identified last
year, to the point where even the usually compliant Western media is forced
to admit the truth.

But no matter! It’s on to the next regime-change operation in the West’s relentless
pursuit of a new cold war against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Ukraine yesterday,
Macedonia today, Moldova and perhaps
Kaliningrad tomorrow. The EU and its American allies won’t be satisfied
until they have Putin’s head on a pike – or until they’ve ginned up the twenty-first
century equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis.

The major media have completely bought into this propaganda campaign, including
some
alleged "libertarians." Antiwar.com is virtually the only major
media outlet – yes, we’re major media, we have a Drudge link, after all! – that
is bringing you an objective analysis of events in the former Soviet bloc. From
the US-engineered coup in Ukraine to the current shenanigans in Macedonia, we’ve
been pretty much alone in bypassing the government propaganda and giving you
the facts.

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policy of perpetual aggression. Do we really want to make Russia our enemy,
and risk a nuclear confrontation? I know your answer to that question is an
unequivocal "No!", but unless we begin to generate some grassroots
opposition to our policy of meddling in the former Soviet bloc we just may have
World War III on our hands.

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NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here.
But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often
made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo